Electrical loads, which are driven with relatively high electric power, are sometimes controlled by electronic control circuits that make use of semiconductor power switches. A typical example for such an electronic control circuit is an inverter that generates an alternating voltage from a direct current for driving an electric motor. The power switches are usually metal-oxide semiconductor, field-effect transistors (MOSFET's) or insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBT's).
Two types of gate driver circuits for controlling the main power switches of the electronic control circuit are commonly used, bipolar and complementary. The bipolar gate drivers suffers from poor voltage utilization, speed limitations, and difficulty in applying different turn-on versus turn-off output resistances. The complementary configuration gate driver overcomes these problems, but a translation from logic level signals (e.g., 0 and 5 volts) to the correct levels is needed to drive a driver transistor (e.g., driver output transistor). A simple resistor and P-channel MOSFET inverter is typically used for this purpose as a pre-driver in conjunction with a voltage limiter, but this pre-driver is either slow with low power consumption or fast with high power consumption depending on design choices.
Thus, there is a need for a pre-driver circuit for driving a power driver controlling a semiconductor power switch that provides fast switching speed with low power consumption.